Plankton Summary: Macroscopic Global Web Cache Topology Visualization
Plankton has not been actively maintained since 1998 and is no longer supported. These pages are made available for historical purposes.
(from perspective of NLANR root caches)
Brad Huffaker
Jaeyeon Jung
Duane Wessels
k claffy
NLANR/ CAIDA
(current version of Plankton)
(current version of software)
(current cache topology data set (ascii)
The National Science Foundation is sponsoring NLANR, the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research, to develop and deploy a prototype of a global web caching hierarchy to alleviate some of the problems imposed by ever increasing Internet traffic growth. With root caches located at each node of the NSF's high speed backbone service, the vBNS, the NLANR web caching hierarchy has experienced a steady increase in usage since its inception in December 1995. As of January 1998, we receive requests from over 450 cache clients in dozens of countries and serve between 40-50 Gbytes per day.
Visualization of cross-provider Internet components, such as a logical cache mesh, is a challenging task that has received little attention from the research community. Plankton offers a visualization of the international cache topology as seen from the perspective of the NLANR root caches.